Whiny over-privileged douchebags - New comment on Microsoft Has Turned The Corner.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Microsoft Has Turned The Corner":

"The "it's not personal, it's just business" line that is often repeated in times of layoffs is pure BS. It is ALWAYS personal. It was personal when they told you that you had to "own" your job. It was personal when you spent your evenings at work to meet a deadline, forgoing time with your family."
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No, they just tricked you into thinking it was personal. I admit, it IS deceptive on their part. They flatter you, say you're the best of the best, give you a bunch of benefits, tell you you're doing critical/important work, etc. Ultimately the company's loyalty to you (or the community) is not an official priority for anyone--not your lead, not your manager, not the executives, not the shareholders, etc.

I'm sorry... who tricked you? What kind of dumbass goes to work for a monopoly conglomerate and expects to be treated like a human being?

You whiny over-privileged douchebags really need a reality check -- welcome to capitalism. If you want to hug your boss and hold hands with the people you work with, you really need to find a different line of work. When you go to work for Microsoft, you step into the belly of the beast. If you ever forget you're in the belly of the beast, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Great to the last sentence - New comment on Microsoft Has Turned The Corner.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Microsoft Has Turned The Corner":

amused at the swarm of "Microsoft is irrelevant/none of my friends use it" comments after MONTHS of inactivity on Mini...yeah, it's so irrelevant you obsessively track a blog about Microsoft and leap to your keyboards the second a new post goes up

lol what up Steve Jobs, is your AIDS in remission?

(Great response… up to the last sentence.)

Windows 7 junk? Nope - New comment on Microsoft Has Turned The Corner.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Microsoft Has Turned The Corner":

You call Windows 7 innovative? It's a piece of junk. Vista with a slightly newer UI and the same mess under the covers. Bing?? That's the strategy for search? Give me a break. In a recent poll most users cannot tell the difference between Google and Bing. Bing is, at best, disruptive to Google, but is far from a winner.

Let's face it, Microsoft has lost big time! People are getting more and more fed up with the crap put out by Microsoft. Microsoft is heading down the path of IBM... the path to being irrelevant.

(Sorry, but I've been dogfooding Win7 for a good long time and it's not junk. Lost me there. But I'm willing to hear more about your direct experience and what you expected to do differently than it did.)

Until Apple what? - New comment on Microsoft Has Turned The Corner.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Microsoft Has Turned The Corner":

Windows Mobile has lost credibility and is sinking in the marketplace. The Zune is on life support. Thanks to design flaws and a huge paydown on future repairs, the XBox may never make a profit. Bing is gaining...well sure but double the number of Bing users and you've still got squat bucket. Marketing learned nothing from the Vista debacle - you have too many Win7 versions. There should be only one. Treat everyone to the same features and stop nickel and diming us. We are nearing the Win7 release and still don't have firm plans for a family pack.

Turning the corner? When you are nostrils deep in a manure pile you don't celebrate because the level dropped to your lower lip! Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for MS to actually create a product the market wants instead of copying everyone else. Turning the corner? MS has to wait until Apple farts before it knows where the corner is.

(I was leaning towards posting until the whole fart thing)

Comment Stream - "Microsoft Has Turned The Corner"

Unmoderated comment stream for the latest Mini Microsoft post "Microsoft Has Turned The Cornder." And yes, anonymous comments are currently turned off. You can find my comment in one of the recent posts as to why. You can still post unmoderated comments, you just need to do so through a Google / Blogger ID or through an OpenID. And behind the edits: here's the bit I was going into the weeds on that I gave up. Basically, I was making the argument that we in product development should focus on just being engineers creating a product and that we had allowed ourselves to become way too specialized, actually lobotomizing our ability to get good work done. In unpolished form:

For product development: Yahoo!'s Carol Bartz has a good point when she swears like a sailor over the number of designers and program managers vs. actual developers. In fact, at this point in the history of Microsoft, we need to hit the career reset button: the PM / Test / Dev path has diverged people like Eloi and Morlocks. What I mean is that career development in most groups has become a walled garden of "...oh, the PM will figure that out..." or "...that's not my job, it's the <insert other discipline>'s job..." At the basic level, the PM / Test / Dev designation helps basic ownership. But it has really gone way to far at Microsoft.

What we need to be are engineers. Engineers who code. Engineers who design for our customers and that connect with our customers. Engineers who create automation. Engineers who plan product strategy. Engineers who hammer on the features and rip that little black box apart into scraps. Engineers who can claim responsibility for all of the feature's lifecycle, and for all of the product.

I think of that demotivation.com poster: "None of us is as dumb as all of us." The dumb part is acquiescing all thinking and decision making based on discipline ownership. Too often, teams spend a huge amount of time planning, a huge amount of time stabilizing, and a slice of time actually writing the features, cutting all of the features limb by limb you loaded up on your planning until you've reached a weary consensus of what's left you can do. It's better than the past but it is still hugely inefficient. You need engineers who can demonstrate end-to-end feature development, from rough design to prototype to stable implementation to quality release. You need engineers who can sell their feature ideas with entrepreneurial zeal through running code, not decoupled from reality with Photoshop and PowerPoint.

Who do we keep around? Those folks. Who - from product development - do we throw into my 15,000? The folks walled off into one small part of being an Engineer at Microsoft. Specialization is for insects.